


Fighting Chances

by pluperfectsunrise



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: AU - Canon Divergence, Background death of Ginny Weasley, But only a bit, Comfort Sex, Grief/Mourning, Healing, Hurt/Comfort, Light shades of D/s, M/M, SMUTTY SMUT, Smut, Why does AO3 automatically capitalize that?, not a wip, smut with feels
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-07
Updated: 2020-11-14
Packaged: 2021-03-08 22:35:57
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 7,302
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27424327
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pluperfectsunrise/pseuds/pluperfectsunrise
Summary: After a loss, Harry finds comfort in a trip to the seaside with Severus Snape.Harry reached up and circled one of Snape’s biceps with his right hand, turning and tugging. Against all caution, he wondered if this was what it felt like to elope.
Relationships: Harry Potter/Severus Snape
Comments: 50
Kudos: 329





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Writing this helped me calm down during the anxiety of this week, lol. Hopefully it can help you too. I've got the second half written and will post it sometime in the next few days.

On the night before he died, Harry Potter made a vow.

“The seaside,” Harry murmured into the cooling sweat on the bony shoulder where he was pillowing his head. “I’ve never been." Not for a holiday, anyway. The island where the Dursleys had taken him to escape his Hogwarts letters and the cave by the sea where he and Dumbledore had found the false locket certainly didn't count.

“The seaside is for children and tourists,” said the man with whom Harry was spending the final night of his life. Which Harry had not expected in the slightest—but it had, at least, gone a long ways toward taking his mind off of all the dying he was about to do.

“Sounds lovely,” Harry agreed with a grin. “We should go.”

“Potter…”

Harry could hear the weariness and heaviness in the man’s voice. 

“If we both survive,” Harry interrupted to explain. “I’m not asking for anything other than that, Professor. And I haven’t forgotten what I need to do. Just, if we both somehow manage to survive, let’s go to the seaside together. Yeah?”

Harry lifted up his head to peer at his companion, and dark eyes met his and held.

“Get to sleep, brat,” the man finally said, shifting to stare up at the roof of their tent, where they could hear branches rustling in the wind.

Harry watched them too for a time. “I don’t know if I can," he finally admitted. He needed to be fresh for the fight in the morning, but he had so little time left. He didn't want to spend it sleeping.

“Try,” the man said softly. He was shifting them both until Harry was wrapped in strong arms, his back pressed to a lean chest. It was such a feeling of warmth and safety that Harry wanted to hunch his shoulders forward and cry.

Instead he said, “Okay,” and he closed his eyes, and he thought about visiting the sea.

~

They both survived.

But the intimacy between them had lasted only a night. And peacetime, for Harry, turned out to be just as full of obligations as the war had been. The tide of his life pulled him in a certain direction, and he didn’t have the energy to fight it. He’d been fighting for so long.

He was an Auror now, a beloved national icon. He had responsibilities. Life went on. He waited for the tide to turn.

~

When it happened, it came upon Harry suddenly, and he couldn’t say why. Maybe it was the stricken expressions of the Weasleys. Maybe it was the cloying smell of all the white flowers in the sympathy wreaths. Maybe it was how a camera had flashed in his face right before he arrived at the service. The picture would likely make the front page of the _Prophet_ tomorrow under “The Hero Bereaved” or "An Old Flame Extinguished" or something trite and shitty like that.

All Harry knew was that, all of a sudden, his resolve had vanished—and he hadn’t known it was disappearing until it was already gone.

"Leaving, Mr. Potter?" asked a familiar voice just as Harry was almost out the door of the funeral parlor.

Harry wouldn’t have stopped for many people at that moment, but this was one of the few. Harry took a deep breath and turned to face his interlocutor. “I can’t…” He shook his head. “I just can’t do it anymore, Snape. I need to get away. I need some fucking distance.”

The man’s expression was unreadable.

Harry wanted to catch him by the front of his black robes, undo those gleaming buttons so that he could wind his fingers through the eyelets. “Come with me?” he wanted to ask. 

The words trembled on the tip of his tongue and then actually made it out...and Harry was immediately overtaken by a wave of shame. No matter what had once happened between them, they weren't like that anymore. How could he ask that, of this man? This man who had once hated Harry so passionately, but had given him so much despite that?

And yet, there are instances of unexpected benediction in any life.

“One moment,” Snape said after peering at him. He twisted on one heel and strode out the door onto the street (the funeral parlor had been one of the latest additions to Hogsmeade), then Apparated with an echoing pop.

Harry followed him outside into the bright air and waited, fidgeting from foot to foot.

When Snape reappeared a few minutes later, he was holding a sleek dark valise in one hand.

“Is that…an overnight bag?” Harry asked, squinting down at it in shock.

“I see that your Auror training hasn't gone to waste,” the other man answered dryly. He raised a eyebrow. “I imagine you have a destination in mind?”

Harry hadn’t, actually…at least, not until this very moment. “Yeah,” Harry confirmed, trying to sound confident. “Can I Side-Along you?”

“If you must,” Snape agreed with a sour expression.

Harry's breaths were coming hard and fast. He wanted to laugh. 

But no, he didn't, not at all. “Okay.”

He reached up and circled one of Snape’s biceps with his right hand, turning and tugging. Against all caution, he wondered if this was what it felt like to elope. 

They spun away.

~

In the six years that had passed since the night before he died, Harry had, in fact, had the opportunity to visit the seaside. He still hadn’t been there on holiday, though.

The village where he took them was a place that he’d passed through once on a case. It consisted entirely of a few restaurants, shops, and houses on one side of a gravel road with a row of inns with peeling paint on the other—and beyond that was the ocean, disappearing around the curve of the earth. Tourism, indeed.

The last inn before the village ended was called the Fighting Chance. The name stirred something in Harry, something poignant and uncertain and raw and wailing. It seemed portentous. There were also bright flowerbeds wrapped around the base of the building, spilling over with colorful blossoms. Petunias, if Harry remembered his botany correctly. They looked nothing like his aunt.

“Here?” he asked the man who’d come with him.

Snape's only answer was to purse his lips, then make his way to the corner of the building with a shabby sign marked "Office" above it.

"We're under renovation," the clerk behind the desk told them with a bored expression. "There's only one room left, and it's a one bed."

"That's fine," Harry said, not really thinking about it.

The question of who would pay was answered by the simple fact that Snape pulled a Muggle wallet from a pocket somewhere in his robes and offered a credit card. Harry would have to pay him back.

~

The room was lovely. Even in his foggy headspace, Harry could recognize that. There were windows stretching along one wall, looking out over a cliff to the ocean--a ragged sort of vista with a few fishing boats and one that looked like it was sailing for pleasure visible on the choppy expanse. There was also a very large bathtub in the bedroom's en suite, clean and inviting.

“Sorry,” Harry said, gesturing at the single bed, still numb and at a loss.

Once again, Snape didn’t reply.

There was a door in one wall that proved to lead out to a railed deck. Stepping out onto it, Harry felt the wind off the water in his hair, leaving a patina of salt.

“Would you like to climb down to the sea?” he asked his companion, going back inside.

Snape had changed clothing. He looked like a Muggle now in trousers and a button-down, both dark, both tight.

“Very well.”

Harry choked back a laugh. Somehow, he hadn’t expected Snape to say yes.

~

“Let’s build a hut out of driftwood,” Harry said once they’d made their way down a path on the side of the cliff and his feet were buried in sand. (Snape, unsurprisingly, had refused to take off his shoes.)

It was cold and windy, despite the fact that it was almost summer. They were the only people on the beach.

Snape looked skeptical. "An entire hut, Potter? Don't you think that's a tad ambitious?"

"You're the one who's supposed to be a Slytherin,” Harry pointed out. For the first time that day, Harry felt a grin tugging up the corners of his lips. “And we're wizards, remember?"

They built a hut.

At first it was only Harry, but then Snape, who’d been standing still and glaring at Harry the whole time with his hair whipping in the wind and his arms over his chest, finally uncrossed them to pull out his wand. “You’re not doing it right,” he groused. “That beam will never hold if you don't dig it in deeper.”

When they worked together, they accomplished great things quickly. But Harry had known that already from the end of the war.

They ended up creating a lean-to structure with one side backed against the cliff and one open to the sands. When Harry lay down inside of it with his feet stretching out of the open front, he could still see some swathes of sky through the roof beams…but he was proud of what they'd built nonetheless.

It had been late afternoon when they'd left Hogsmeade. Now, dusk had settled down over the seaside. The sky had whitened with it, then turned indigo. The stars had come out. So had the moon.

“I swiped this for you,” Harry said while he was still lying in the sand, handing Snape one of two pre-packaged lollies that he’d taken from a bowl in the inn’s front office and carried down here in his jacket. It was orange. He kept the other one—purple—for himself.

Snape was sitting cross-legged under the hut's awning with his back against the cliff. “This isn’t even fit for the birds,” he said after unwrapping the plastic and giving the lolly an experimental lick.

He licked it again.

Harry fought a smile as he took the crinkly plastic off of his own candy. Of course he wouldn’t receive any sort of thanks from the cranky git.

It was interesting, watching the sky move here, lying shoulder to shoulder—or, more accurately, shoulder to thigh—on the sand with Severus Snape. The man's warmth was making the hairs on Harry's arms prickle.

A gust of wind sprayed seawater on them.

"I didn't know that you knew Gin," Harry said, finally breaking the silence.

Immediately after saying this, Harry flushed at how stupid it sounded. Of course Severus knew—had known—Ginny. He'd been her teacher as well as Harry's; her Headmaster, that terrible year after Dumbledore's death.

"I meant I didn't know you knew her well," he amended.

"One does not need to have known someone intimately to pay one's respects at their passing," Snape answered, shifting from his meditative posture to look down his nose at Harry.

"Right.”

Harry didn’t know why his breaths were suddenly so shuddering. It had been two weeks since Ginny’s death. He ought to be used to funerals—to losing people—by now.

But losing Ginny had been so unexpected—and so senseless. Ginny Weasley. The girl who had taught him to kiss. The girl who he'd once dreamed of marrying.

An accident while training for the upcoming quidditch season with the Holyhead Harpies: a recently waxed broom, a Bludger. A shift in the wind, a fall. 

A landing.

Harry bit his lower lip so hard it bled. He finished his lolly and vanished the stick.

He thought about Ginny's perpetual fight not to become her mother. Her shirt clinging with sweat to her breasts and flat stomach after Quidditch practice sixth year. How she'd flirted with Harry; how he felt as if a fire in his heart was flaring to life as he learned to flirt back. Her face streaked with dust and tears as she helped take care of the bodies after the last battle. How she was the one who'd had the courage to tell him that they were never going to be happy if they stayed together. 

"But we'll have a fighting chance if we get on with things apart," she’d said.

Harry closed his eyes against everything: the ocean, the driftwood hut, Severus Snape. The tears came, and they were silent. Harry had learned long ago not to make noise when he cried.

When he was ready to open his eyes again, he saw that Snape was watching him. 

The other man climbed to his feet, graceful even in the sand, and brushed himself off. “Come along, Potter,” he said in a harsh voice. 

The tip of his wand was lit. Harry saw in his swimming vision that so were the windows of their inn at the top of the cliff, orange and warm, a harbor in the night.

Snape led the way back up the dirt path, and Harry followed. Sometimes, he had to steady himself by grabbing handfuls of the plants that bordered the trail.

When they reached their room again, tension was thrumming between them, choked silence. Snape cut directly to the bathroom and turned on the taps of the bath until water cascaded out.

Despite the size of the tub, it filled up quickly. Steam was rising from it. “Dirty children need their baths,” Snape said with an ironic lilt to his tone, looking at Harry.

"There's just as much sand on you as on me," Harry answered with a frown.

Snape performed an efficient cleaning charm on himself. 

Harry had pulled out his wand as well. He could do that too, after all. "Then why don't I just..."

"The bath is already drawn,” the man interrupted, suddenly sounding tired. “Would you let it go to waste?"

"I suppose not," Harry answered eventually with reluctance.

But as he looked at the steaming water, Harry’s objections disappeared. The reluctance had really just been related to Snape calling him a child. Harry hadn’t been one for a long time. He knew that the other man knew that, though. And he supposed that Snape _had_ said that the seaside was for tourists and children. Which would make the berk the other element of the equation, Harry realized with grudging amusement.

And a bath sounded nice, actually. Really nice. With a sigh, Harry went into the en suite and closed the door behind him, stripped carefully, stepped into the water, and let his body sink down.

Slowly, the heat leached into Harry’s muscles. The tub was big enough for two, he thought wistfully while he soaked.

But we don’t always get what we wish for. Even when we know precisely what we’re wishing, which Harry certainly did not.

After Harry climbed out of his bath and pulled the plug to drain the water, he wrapped himself in a terrycloth robe that was hanging conveniently in the adjoining closet, then opened the door to the bedroom again.

Snape was stretched out on the bed, his legs crossed at the ankles, a book open in his hands. Harry couldn't quite make out the title, and he didn’t know where Snape had got it; most likely, he’d brought it with him in his bag.

Seeing Harry dripping in the lit doorway, Snape closed the book and set it aside.

They regarded each other. Harry wondered what Snape saw in his face, his eyes.

Snape’s eyes, for their part, were dark, liquid. Only very black eyes could manage that, Harry reflected.

“What are you drinking?” Harry finally asked, gesturing at the tumbler on the bedside table next to man, placed carefully on a coaster under the lamp.

Harry saw his throat bob. “Whisky,” he said, his voice measured and controlled. Snape wanted, Harry could tell, to appear at ease.

He gestured, and Harry saw the bottle—which there was no doubt that Snape had brought in his overnight bag—on a side counter that also housed a carafe of tea bags, cups and mugs, and an electric kettle. “You may have some if you like.”

Harry nodded. "Thanks."

As he grabbed a cup and poured, he reflected that there were so many faces and facets to this man, each one nested inside the last like China dolls. That was, perhaps, the most attractive part of Snape to Harry (with 'attractive’ meaning that Harry's thoughts were drawn toward him as if magnetized). 

That there was always more. Underneath each layer was another, and another after that. 

Harry had caught a glimpse of what was at the core of all these layers—the core of the man who had been the villain of his childhood, much more present and tangible than Voldemort, much easier to hate–in a vial of memories. This glimpse hadn't been enough for him. After Harry had seen them, he knew that Snape had cared for his mother, and that he, Harry, was about to die…and none of it had been anywhere close to _enough_.

Harry took a sip of the whisky and grimaced.

“It’s good,” he said once he’d swallowed.

"No need to pretend on my account,” Snape drawled with a lifted brow. He seemed to be amused.

Feeling the alcohol warming his throat and belly, Harry shook his head. "It’s just my back,” he explained. “It’s been tight and knotted for weeks.” The bath had helped a bit, but everything that had happened to Harry for a number of years had seemed to add to the weight pressing down on his shoulders, and he’d been carrying too much tension for too long for it to truly have dissipated in such a short time.

Snape had been sitting very still with his hands folded in his lap, watching Harry. Now, he finally moved, swinging his legs down from the mattress and standing. He gestured at the large bed that he’d just vacated, saying, “Lie down."

The lift at the end of the sentence that transformed it into a question was barely perceptible, but Harry heard it nonetheless. “Okay,” he agreed.

“I’m going to touch you,” Snape said once Harry had got settled. “A massage. May I?”

Where Snape had been sitting, the sheets were still warm. “Thank you,” Harry said emphatically, rolling so that the other man could access his back. 

He felt the mattress dip beside him and close his eyes. 

“Fuck,” Harry moaned as soon as the other man started kneading his shoulders. “Sorry,” he added a second later with a chagrined laugh. “That just feels really good.”

Snape gave an answering snort, then worked Harry’s muscles in silence, his hands warm and strong.

And yet, the sense that Harry had of this was muted by the fact that Snape’s hands were still on the other side of the bathrobe. The fabric was thick. 

Harry cleared his throat. “I could…I could take off my robe. If you want.”

It was a fraught moment. Fragile. As fraught as the history that stretched behind them, as fragile as peace.

The hands on Harry’s back had frozen, then been drawn away. Harry rolled over so that he could see the other man. 

Snape was staring at him.

His expression was eerily reminiscent of the one he had worn when they were going into battle. Or maybe it was that he looked like he was standing on the edge of the Astronomy tower and about to kill someone he cared about deeply—or fall off himself.

“If you would like to, you may strip,” Snape finally ordered. “Entirely.”

If Snape fell, Harry knew that they were going to fall together.

Harry exhaled. As he undid the tie of his robe and let it drop off his arms and to the ground, he felt sort of light and weightless. There was nothing in the other man’s gaze that made him want to hide.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Comments always welcome <3 <3


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And now for the good stuff...

The story of the night before Harry died was, in certain ways, a simple one. He'd been lonely; he couldn't sleep. They were going to attack the stronghold of the Death Eaters before first light.

Snape was the one who'd come up with the scheme of it—or rather, Snape and Harry working together. Harry had known that his former professor was still on their side ever since the night of Voldemort's first attack on Hogwarts. Harry had left Snape for dead in the Shrieking Shack with a vial of murky white memories in hand, then arrived back later to discover that the man had managed to heal himself from Nagini's bite with potions and strong magic. 

But right after attempting to kill Snape, Voldemort had decided to flee back to Malfoy Manor, where he spent two days making additional horcruxes. His next attack on Hogwarts had been utterly devastating. They'd lost the castle and fled, and the war dragged on and on.

Snape and Harry had come to a sort of truce over those fraught months, putting aside their former animosity enough to work together and figure out how the Light could possibly win.

Harry hadn't known that he would go to Snape's tent that final night, however, until he was already standing outside of it, hesitating, calling out softly if he could come inside.

At that point, Harry had most definitely not been a virgin. He’d already had sex with eight different people. After he’d found out he was going to need to sacrifice himself, he’d decided that he didn’t want to die without having sex with at least one person. And after _that_ , he’d decided that he didn’t want to die without having sex with at least one more…and so on.

Doing it with Snape had been better than all eight combined. Having Snape below him panting his name and whispering coarse demands was a miracle. If circumstances had been kinder, Harry would have happily kept making love with him until sunrise.

But they weren’t, and he didn’t. He made a vow, even if he didn’t know he was doing that at the time, and he fell asleep.

After they’d won the war and Harry died but it didn't stick, he and Snape went their separate ways. Harry dated Ginny, who eventually (and emphatically) broke up with him. He and Snape saw each other once every few months during and after that period—usually for work, sometimes just for dinner. 

And Harry tried not to remember the feel of Snape’s skin beneath his palms or how needily Snape’s legs had wrapped around his waist. He didn’t allow himself to think of the man as Severus.

But at odd moments, difficult ones, he would find his mind straying to the idea—the promise—of going with Severus Snape to the sea.

~

And here they were.

Harry had let his bathrobe fall. His hair was still damp from the bath. He wondered what came next.

Snape was apparently of the same mind. “You will tell me what you wish for, in these circumstances,” the other man ordered. "What you wish to happen." 

While Harry had stood, Snape had sat carefully back down on the edge of the bed, his spine straight. His gaze seemed to be riveted on Harry's bare chest and stomach and legs and the place between them where Harry's cock was starting to thicken.

“All right,” Harry said, hearing the dryness of his throat in his voice. “I want…” 

All that came to mind was a blank, however. A blank, and memories of what they’d done the last time—how he’d pressed forward, and Snape had buckled, then pressed back, demanding more.

And yet, for all of its delights, it had been nothing more than a brief fumbling, cock against cock, intensified by fear. Harry wanted something else this time, something different...he just couldn't see past the emptiness in his mind to understand _what._

“What if I don’t know?” he asked sheepishly, rubbing the back of his neck.

Snape’s eyebrows rose. “Take a moment and consider it,” he instructed. His voice and the command rolled over Harry like a sea-borne fog.

Harry let his arm fall and closed his eyes. 

After a moment of listening to the waves crash against the shoreline below, a question had come to mind. "Have you ever wanted this?" he wondered. "Maybe after Dumbledore died?"

A deep line appeared between Snape’s eyebrows. “You will need to be more specific.”

Harry huffed out a breath, feeling one side of his lips quirk. Right. He could see how that might have been deeply confusing.

“Did you want someone else to take control?”

“Ah,” Snape said. His eyes closed in a slow blink, and Harry saw his hands tremble for an instant before steadying.

Daring, Harry reached out and cupped the other man’s shoulder with one palm. “It was the right thing to do,” he offered. “The only way forward.”

“I’m aware,” Snape answered after a moment of stillness.

“We wouldn’t have won without what you did.”

The man’s nostrils flared. He finally opened his eyes to look up at Harry again. They glittered. “I’m aware of that as well, you aggravating boy.” 

Harry couldn’t help smiling at this.

Snape’s expression, meanwhile, had transformed with impatience. “And to answer your question… Perhaps. If there had been anyone who I could have gone to safely and who I trusted.” Snape’s shoulders did a strange thing: half loosening, half rising. “Have you considered what you want, yet?”

Had he?

“I want you to decide,” Harry finally said. As soon as he spoke the words, he knew they were true.

Snape blinked once again. His hands rose and hovered over Harry’s bare skin, hesitating. They settled lightly on Harry's hips.

“Then I will use you for my pleasure,” he answered, simple and low.

As if they’d been given permission (and in a way, they had), a wheel of fantasies rushed to the forefront of Harry’s thoughts. Had Snape meant that to be a warning? Because that, Harry realized, was _exactly_ what he wanted: to be shown the burning, the aggression, the bitterness, the need, the asking. To be shown Snape at his barest. And if, when he was at his barest, what he reached for was Harry…well, then the world was a better place than Harry had been giving it credit for lately.

“Is that what you’d like?” Snape finished.

Harry nodded fervidly. “ _Please_ ,” he exhaled.

Still, the man didn't move. “You will not finish until I say so,” he rasped, heavy lidded. “Do I have your consent?”

Something about that made Harry’s insides clench with heat. “I’ll try my best,” he agreed, rather breathless.

Snape dipped his chin in a slight nod. Then, he slipped one thumb against Harry’s erection just under the head, pinning it back against Harry’s stomach. Leaning forward, he breathed against the bottom of the shaft and pressed a single kiss to it.

Feeling his length jerk against the thumb that was holding him in place, Harry almost whimpered. He reflected on the fact that each of Snape’s touches was so solitary, so self-contained—and yet, each seemed to indicate the existence of something much larger than the touch itself. It was like peering through the keyhole of a closed door and seeing another world. 

Worlds and worlds, Harry thought as Severus nodded again and said, “Kneel.”

~

In later years, Harry would think back on the night he’d spent with Severus Snape by the sea as the center of his life. 

Whether it was learning how much he liked using his mouth on Snape's cock—

(Careful—so careful—Harry leaned his cheek against one of Snape’s still-clothed thighs, then fitted his lips over the head of the dark erection that Snape had pulled out of the open zip of his denims. It fit into his mouth perfectly. “Mm,” Harry moaned in contentment) 

—or what it felt like to have the acerbic man’s tongue squirming in and out of his arsehole—

(“ _This_ is using me for your pleasure?” Harry gasped in between broken curses and laughter, to which his former professor only offered a blithe hum in reply) 

—that night was the turning point, the hours when everything changed.

"This is certainly one of the things that I would do in heaven, were I ever to be admitted," Snape finally paused in licking into Harry's quivering rectum long enough to answer. As soon as he finished speaking, he plunged devotedly back to his task.

" _God_ ," Harry grunted, laughing at the sheer blasphemy of it and how hot it was. He was also starting to sweat and shake, feeling his cock weep trails of precum onto the sheets below him, and he had to turn his face into a pillow to muffle the noises he couldn't keep from making. Broad licks, pointed ones—Harry didn’t think he’d ever felt anything quite as good as this before, and it was all bringing him close—too close—to the edge.

Desperate, Harry crawled forward on the bed to break the contact and rolled onto his back. Wordlessly, achingly, he looked up at the other man—his curtains of scraggly black hair, his unforgiving features, his long-sleeved shirt buttoned all the way to the top, and his jeans—riding high on his hips, but with his cock still taken out from Harry's earlier attentions, cradled protectively at this moment in one of Snape's elegant hands…

“I’d like to see you too,” Harry said, jutting out his chin.

Snape’s eyebrows rose. “Are your glasses no longer the correct prescription?” he mocked gently.

It wasn’t difficult to muster a glare from behind the eyepieces in question. “You know what I mean.” 

The moment stretched—and then Snape sighed.

Harry had ended a war. He knew what surrender looked like.

Snape began to unbutton his shirt.

Underneath the shirt, Snape’s stomach proved to be flat and pale. He was certainly more muscular than he seemed—but there was still something of softness to it, of vulnerability.

There were also long, dark strands of hair around his nipples and leading down his chest to his belly button and below, where the hair coarsened. That was what Harry saw next, once the shirt had been shrugged from Snape’s shoulders. Then the dark denims were peeled down to reveal sharp hipbones, so sallow that they reminded Harry of the moon.

Snape finished pushing his trousers down his long, skinny legs and stepped out of them. His cock bobbed with the movement—dark-skinned, almost purple, nested in a thatch of inky black pubic hair. Long and full.

Even on the night before he died, they'd stayed under the covers, so Harry had never had the chance to look at the man without his armaments of clothing. He drank in the sight of Snape stretched up above him now, naked and gorgeous and bitter and strong.

Harry couldn’t keep his desire in check. “ _Severus_ ,” he groaned, reaching out to catch his partner's hand and tug him down.

He’d thought that the man might balk at this or outright refuse. But even very thick walls eventually crumble, and Snape answered Harry's plea by pulling Harry to his feet and pressing against Harry’s mouth with his own.

Kissing. Snape was kissing him.

It wasn’t a perfect kiss. It was awkward, sometimes too harsh, too demanding. Their noses didn't avoid each other entirely. There were also more teeth involved than Harry would normally have liked. If he had received this kiss from anyone else, he would have ended it immediately—and probably the whole encounter as well. 

But things were very different when he was being snogged by Severus Snape.

Even after everything they’d done since their negotiation, Harry hadn’t realized how much he needed this. How right it would feel to have their bare chests pressed together, warm and flat, heartbeat against beating heart. (He could feel how fast and heavily both hearts were thrumming.) To have Snape’s—Severus’s—tongue invading his mouth so passionately…to be able to lick and suck it just like he'd done to the older man's cock, not to mention exploring the man's mouth with his own tongue, the soft palate and crooked teeth...

"Oh Christ," Harry moaned, breaking away for the sake of not dying from oxygen deprivation.

Severus—because certainly Harry was allowed to start thinking of him as _Severus_ now—stared down at him, his cheeks stained with blotchy red. “Your lips,” he murmured on a strained exhale, his top teeth digging into his own curled bottom lip. "Harry, _fuck_."

Now that he mentioned it... Harry nodded frantically. “Yeah. Yeah, that.”

They kissed again, lurching together more than anything else and then tripping onto the bed. Severus landed heavily on top of Harry's body. For some reason, Harry was particularly aware of the sound of the wind rushing against the seaward side of their little room at the inn as this happened, cold wind roaring off the Atlantic.

Severus was the one who broke the string of messy kisses this time, turning his face away, his nose and lips pressed against one of Harry’s shoulders and his hair spilling across Harry’s neck and chin. "Ridiculous boy," he hissed, sounding as if he were forcing the words out. "I shouldn't... You're in mourning."

"I am, but that's not why I want it," Harry reassured him. "I want it so much." Because this was the thing that Harry had needed to see, the thing he’d been looking for all along. How much did Severus want him, want this? Where Harry’s nature was to rush forward toward everything—danger, but also joy and love—Severus’s was to be cautious, to hold back, to watch and guard. Could Harry make the other man lose control? 

"Please?" he asked again.

But Severus had snapped back to face Harry and started to glare at him. “I’m not here to be employed for a purpose and then discarded,” he growled.

"What?" Harry felt his eyes widen. "What purpose?"

If anything, this only made the glare intensify. Severus leaned closer. "Someone to bathe you and fuck you and tell you what to do until you feel better," he whispered into Harry's ear, licking it. It was an oddly petulant sort of lick.

"Ahh—that's not—I like all of that, but it's not it at all, I mean it's not everything—" 

Harry was scrabbling for coherency in his protests, attempting to think this through instead of dissolving with arousal. "You ninny, you know I want more than just tonight!" he finally burst out.

Severus reeled back as if slapped. It seemed that Harry had been wrong: he had _not_ known that Harry had any intentions regarding the future. 

“Why?” he asked, almost too soft to hear. He was starting to sit up on the bed, pull away, a chill seeping between them.

"Because.” Harry pressed up against his former professor, into his warmth, skin against skin. This was _not_ a moment when he was willing to let Severus go.

At least not until the man had heard what Harry was trying to say. 

They were lying on their sides now, face to face. Harry gathered his courage. “Because you built a fort with me on the beach," he explained carefully, holding the other man's hands and eyes. 

He wanted to look away toward the ceiling and the room’s high black windows to gather his thoughts, but this was too important for that. "Because if I think of my future with you in it, I know that each day will be important, and interesting, and just…worth it all, I suppose.”

Sometime during Harry's speech, Severus had closed his eyes, as if he couldn't bear to look. "Potter..." he grunted. And then, in an entirely different tone of voice, helpless and pained, "We'll make each other miserable. We'll fight."

"I know.” Harry pressed a soft kiss to one high cheekbone. “But then we'll fight to make it better." He didn’t know where he’d got this newfound certainty, but it was real and true and coming from down deep in his core: he and Severus were right for each other. They could make it work.

As if he were powerless to keep from doing it, Severus turned his head and claimed Harry’s lips once more.

“Let's fuck, yeah?” Harry whispered some time later, having been kissed so thoroughly that he was incapable of thinking with anything but his prick again. "I don’t need much preparation.”

This was what finally seemed to draw Severus out of his uncertainty, restoring him to a sort of equilibrium. He snorted. 

“I'm not certain that I should take your word for that,” he replied, leaning down to cage Harry with his body. His tone was solemn, but also light. His eyes were dancing.

And he was giving Harry what he wanted without wasting any more time—grabbing a pillow to slide under Harry’s bum, hitching up Harry's knees, positioning himself between them. Whispering under his breath, deep and melodious. It proved to be a spell that had Harry feeling slippery and open down there all of a sudden in a way that gave his whole body shivers, covering his skin with gooseflesh even while it was still flushed from their shared pleasures. Oh boy, he had to get Severus to teach him that one.

Staring down at Harry’s shivering body, Severus leaned down to breathe foggy heat against his cheek, then began rubbing his cock against the rim of the younger man’s sensitive hole. 

It was a pressure that left and then returned insistently, again and again. Harry's ring of muscle down there was well-licked and lubricated, and he felt his entrance trembling and leaking against Severus's nice fat cockhead as he kept holding his legs up...until finally the man’s hips gave a deft surge and Harry's opening flared enough that the head of his prick popped inside.

Harry gasped. Severus pressed against him and kept kissing him through it. It was an onslaught on both sides: the hot erection down below that was being pushed into Harry, sliding deeper and thickening as it went and replacing his feeling of openness with one of profound repletion; and the mouth up above that continued to suck and tease Harry’s lips and steal each gust he exhaled.

When he felt Severus’s balls rubbing against his arse, Harry knew that the man had bottomed out. He let go of his knees and hooked his legs around Severus’s thighs, which freed up his hands to be buried rapturously in Severus’s oily hair.

“Are you all right?” Severus stopped kissing him long enough to ask.

Harry wanted to laugh at the absurdity of the question, when he was so very much better than all right. “Am I still not allowed to come, sir?” he asked flippantly instead.

Severus stared down at him, panting. "I—yes, whenever you want. You feel fucking amazing.” Pulling Harry as tight against himself as possible, he added with their noses brushing together, “Look at what you’ve done to me.”

“How would you—ah—describe it? What I’ve done to you?”

“Brat.” The man smirked slightly. “You blind me with how tempting you are. You’re a fucking wet dream.” He dipped his chin to speak into Harry’s ear. “I want you to come on my cock. I want you to be a good boy and milk me dry.”

With a shudder of delight, Harry clenched lovingly around the hard intrusion in his body that belonged to his former professor. “I will, I will,” he moaned. "Just—get on with it. I don't know how much longer I can last..."

Severus seemed to take this to heart, exhaling harshly and starting to shift his hips—thrusting, hammering, pounding. Harry surrendered himself to the rhythm of it, and the only words that spilled out of his lips now were _harder_ and _fuck_ and _more_ …

Harry knew that he’d been following his heart rather than his head, this whole time. Gripping tightly to the thread of what was real and true. What was necessary. What he needed, right now, in order to survive.

But he hadn’t known that it was this.

He could see in Severus's face how difficult this was for him. That was half of the allure. The way he was so focused, the way he was staring at Harry with his expression raw, as if he were about to crumple. The way each thrust was charged enough to slam Harry up into the headboard, but Severus was holding him in place with his power of will and the strength of his forearms. The feel of Severus’s teeth in Harry’s shoulder. The way Severus was fucking Harry as if his life—or both their lives—depended on it.

Harry could hear the waves outside in the darkness that surrounded their safe harbor. Their joining had the same rhythm—ebb and swell, high and low, give and take, take and give. Harry reached between them to fist his own prick tight and fast— _yesyesyes_ —and then something released inside of him and he came all over their chests and bellies, single-minded, aware only of the utter delight of it and a percussive rush of the sound of the sea and his blood pounding and Severus’s ragged grunts and his own cries into the night.

True to his promise, Harry rode the wave of his orgasm for as long as he could, squeezing tight on the length that was now struggling to fuck in and out of him. It wasn’t long before he felt Severus give a final, desperate series of thrusts and then release a spurt of hot liquid that made Harry feel decadent and filthy as it dribbled out.

He couldn't believe that he'd ever walked away from this man, ever let go.

And Severus was still holding Harry close, their legs tangled. Harry buried his head in the other man’s sweaty neck and started laughing, gulping sobs of it. Severus kept embracing him and whispered a spell to clean them both up so they wouldn’t have to move. He didn't, it seemed, want to loosen his hold.

~

The next morning, Harry wept about Ginny again, then pulled himself together again, and the two men went scavenging for breakfast at the shops down the road. They were ravenous, as they'd skipped dinner the night before. They ended up buying sandwiches and eating them on the cliff's edge looking out over the blue expanse of water, for all the world like two blokes in love.

And right before they left the Fighting Chance and the village by the sea, Severus kept a lookout for any employees of the inn while Harry carefully picked two petunias from the flowerbeds in front, one a deep purple, one a bright and vivid pink.

Severus pressed the purple flower between two pages of the book he’d been reading last night, which of all things turned out to be _Persuasion_. 

When Harry only stared down at the remaining flower without knowing quite what to do with it, Severus took it and threaded the stem carefully through one of the top buttonholes on Harry’s shirt. It rested there close to his heart, bright and soft.

"Ready to Apparate now?" Severus murmured once that was done.

Harry grinned and took hold of the man's forearms. He was taking back more from the seaside than he’d come with, he knew.

Severus’s hands were on Harry’s waist, much firmer now than when they'd Apparated here, much more sure of their welcome.

And Harry had a newfound understanding, tentative as it might be (tentative but growing)—

—of the strength and resilience of his own heart.

“Yeah,” Harry agreed. “Yeah, let’s go home.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry, Ginny. I'll resurrect you in the next story.
> 
> Thanks for reading! Comment if you feel like it and stay safe, friends <3


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